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Introduction The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, serve as constant, stark reminders that America has enemies in the world who seek to kill American men, women, and children, any way they can. Sometimes, the enemies are here at home. —Attorney General John Ashcroft, October 16, 2003, announcing plea agreements in the Portland Cell conspiracy t was still dark when Nuradin Mahamoud Abdi stepped out- I side his apartment on the North Side of Columbus, Ohio, around six o’clock on the morning of November 28, 2003. It was Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, one of the busiest days of the Christmas shopping season. Many others who were awake and leaving their houses at the same predawn hour were headed toward the malls and big-box stores like Target and Best Buy and Wal-Mart that were open hours early to accommodate the traditional Black Friday shoppers. Central Ohio’s outsized retail centers, especially Polaris to the north and Easton on the far east side, were sure to be jammed. By some estimates, greater Columbus has too many malls for its million-plus residents, a potential problem for some retailers but a boon, at least temporarily, for bargain hunters.1 Abdi, however, was going in the other direction, both literally and figuratively. As a Muslim, he had little reason to care about the frenzy of gift giving leading up to Christmas. Keys in hand, the So- mali native was still in his nightclothes, going out to warm up his car before leaving for early morning prayers at Masjid Ibn Taymia, a mosque catering to the city’s large Somali population. After that, it was off to work at his cell phone store in a small Somali mall about a mile away. The thirty-one-year-old Abdi had a lot on his mind as he opened the glass door of his apartment building, stepped under a red awning, and walked into the chilly air of a dark, late-November 1 day. He and his wife, Safia Muse, had two young children and a third on the way. He was working long hours at the store he’d opened just two months earlier, hoping to get it off the ground. His goal was to save enough money to buy a house within the next two years. His mother, two brothers, and a sister also lived in Columbus, and the city, with its solid economy and Somali population second only to that of Minneapolis, was the place Abdi called home. Although he’d traveled out of the country in recent years, he told anyone who asked that he had no plans to leave Ohio. In any case, it wasn’t as if his homeland, in its second decade without a functioning govern- ment, had much to offer a young entrepreneur.2 From the dark, someone called Abdi’s name. He looked over, and a man approached him. The man said that his name was John Corbin and that he was an FBI agent. He showed Abdi his badge and asked him to wait a few minutes. While they stood there, Corbin made a call on his cell phone. “I have Abdi,” he told the person on the other end. “He’s standing with me here.” The two waited for several minutes until at least five cars pulled up. Two men got out and began to search Abdi. They removed his wallet and the other contents of his pockets, then handcuffed him. Richard Wilkens, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement resident agent-in-charge for Columbus, told Abdi they had to check whether he had a bomb in his possession. He didn’t. In his wallet, agents found a will, written in Arabic, that referred in part to his intent to travel to conflict zones in Afghanistan.3 A second ICE agent, Robert Medellin, told Abdi he was being arrested for violating federal immigration laws. When Abdi asked what type of violation, he got a curt reply: “You will know about it.” Another FBI agent, Stephen Flowers, then asked Abdi for permis- sion to search his apartment. He consented. One thing was clear: it looked like Abdi wasn’t going to make it to morning prayers.4 Agents loaded him into an SUV and drove to FBI headquarters on the tenth floor of a building in the city’s Brewery District just south of downtown. He was taken to a room for questioning, ac- companied by Medellin and FBI agents. At 7:42 a.m., he signed a form waiving his Miranda rights. Medellin took the lead in the inter- view, telling Abdi he’d committed a lot of immigration violations and the only way to help himself was to cooperate with the FBI agents in the room. One of those agents, Flowers, then took over. The questions were numerous: Tell us about your background, your 2 hatred at home family here in Columbus, your travels abroad since you first came to the United States. Do you know of any threats or planned attacks against the United States or its allies? Do you remember a meeting FBI agents had with you last spring, when we discussed something a friend of yours—a man named Iyman Faris—had said about you? A statement he’d attributed to you?5 The questioning lasted for hours. Although the agents told Abdi he’d violated federal immigration laws, they didn’t explain those vio- lations or show him any documents detailing their allegations. Later that day, he was transferred to the Kenton County Detention Cen- ter in Covington, Kentucky, across the river from Cincinnati, where the headquarters for the FBI’s southern Ohio division were located. Around noon, Medellin brought Abdi’s lunch. He tried to reason with the prisoner. He’d been an immigration officer for twenty- seven years. He’d seen cases like this before. Medellin had observed Abdi’s children at the apartment that morning, had seen his infant daughter; if he wanted to be with them, he told Abdi, he needed to co- operate. “What did I do?” Abdi asked. Medellin repeated he’d com- mitted many violations. “Can I see them?” Abdi asked. “You are going to see them,” Medellin said, before leaving him alone with his lunch. Later that day, Abdi placed ten collect phone calls from jail, try- ing unsuccessfully to reach his family and a friend.6 The questioning continued Saturday, November 29, and lasted hours more, through the morning and afternoon, and well into the evening. Agents had a lot of information about Abdi, they reminded him, again and again, and he wasn’t telling them what they needed to know. At last Abdi said, “What are you looking for?” Medellin glanced at Wilkens, then looked back at Abdi. “We want to know information about Iyman Faris,” he said. Abdi countered by telling them he hadn’t been brought in to talk about Faris, a friend of his from another mosque, and asked again what immigration violations he’d committed. He wanted to phone his wife to let her know he was all right, but the agents wouldn’t let him place the call.7 The timing of Abdi’s apprehension and the forceful way in which federal agents took him into custody were puzzling. But Abdi Introduction 3 couldn’t have been entirely surprised by this encounter. Of course he remembered their previous meeting. It had been April 2, when agents visited his cell phone store and asked him about conversations he’d had with Faris. Faris, Abdi well knew, was in a lot of trouble with the government. Big trouble. But what did that have to do with him? He’d already disavowed the things the agents said he and Faris had talked about. He was a Muslim, he told them. Our faith forbids us from harming anyone. Back in April, he’d even allowed the agents to search his apartment, and they’d found nothing. He’d produced a valid immigration document at the time and explained how he had come to the United States five years earlier after being smuggled through Mexico. The agents had dutifully noted all this and gone on their way.8 But that was then: nearly eight months later, something had changed. And the hours of questions were starting to wear Abdi down. ◈ ◈ ◈ following the 9/11 attacks, almost every American community experienced a moment of awakening from the illusory dream that such events happened only in faraway lands. For many, including people in Ohio, the new reality began with the calling up of active duty troops and reservists and National Guard members, first to help rout the Taliban in Afghanistan, then to take part in the inva- sion of Iraq. By the middle of 2003, Ohio in general and Columbus in particular had contributed their fair share of soldiers to fight the war on terror overseas. In tiny McConnellsville in southeast Ohio, more than four hundred members of a single Guard unit had been called up in one deployment. Eight Ohio soldiers had been killed in Iraq, including two—Private Brandon Sloan and Sergeant Robert Dowdy—on March 23, 2003, just three days after the invasion.9 Still, the idea that people in Columbus were in personal dan- ger, that people living right next door meant harm, was not on people’s minds. Of course Americans had seen such threats emerge elsewhere—in suburban Buffalo, for example, where several Yemeni Americans had been charged in October 2001 with providing material support to terrorists based on their visits to a training camp in Af- ghanistan.

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